Britain today announced 15 more coronavirus deaths in the preliminary toll — taking the total number of victims to 44,235.
Department of Health chiefs have yet to confirm the final daily figure, which is often much higher because it takes into account lab-confirmed fatalities in all settings.
The early count — which only includes a fraction of the Covid-19 deaths in England — is calculated by adding up the individual updates declared by each of the home nations.
NHS England today posted 15 deaths in hospitals across the country. No Covid-19 fatalities were recorded in any setting in Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland.
Britain recorded more than 1,000 daily fatalities during the darkest days of its crisis but the outbreak has slowed drastically in the past month.
For comparison, only 22 deaths were recorded yesterday — but tolls on Sundays and Mondays are always much lower because of a recording delay at weekends.
In other coronavirus developments in Britain today:
- Coffee chain Pret a Manger is set to axe 30 stores putting 1,000 jobs at risk as it becomes the latest victim of Britain’s High Street coronavirus bloodbath;
- Most of the 90,000 children on the official coronavirus shielding list will be able to return to normal life over the summer, health officials confirmed;
- A historic market town 15 miles south of Leicester was turned into a ‘war zone’ after it was invaded by hundreds of people from the locked down city desperate for a night out with friends;
- The coronavirus could have been lying dormant across the world until being ‘ignited’ by favourable environmental conditions – rather than originating in China, a leading expert claimed.
Department of Health figures released yesterday showed 164,000 tests were carried out or posted the day before. The number includes antibody tests for frontline NHS and care workers.
But bosses again refused to say how many people were tested, meaning the exact number of Brits who have been swabbed for the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been a mystery for a month — since May 22.
Health chiefs also reported 516 more cases of Covid-19. Government statistics show the official size of the UK’s outbreak now stands at 285,416 cases.
But the actual size of the outbreak, which began to spiral out of control in March, is estimated to be in the millions, based on antibody testing data.
The daily death data does not represent how many Covid-19 patients died within the last 24 hours — it is only how many fatalities have been reported and registered with the authorities.
The data does not always match updates provided by the home nations. Department of Health officials work off a different time cut-off, meaning daily updates from Scotland as well as Northern Ireland are always out of sync.
And the count announced by NHS England every afternoon — which only takes into account deaths in hospitals — does not match up with the DH figures because they work off a different recording system.
For instance, some deaths announced by NHS England bosses will have already been counted by the Department of Health, which records fatalities ‘as soon as they are available’.
It comes after health officials today confirmed that most children on the official coronavirus shielding list will be able to return to normal life over the summer.
Doctors are expected to remove all but the sickest children from the list of 93,000 which had been keeping vulnerable youngsters indoors since the coronavirus crisis broke out.
After watching the epidemic unfold over the past four months experts and officials in the UK have decided the risk of children getting severe Covid-19 or dying of it is so low that shielding is no longer necessary.
NHS England statistics show just 0.07 per cent of Covid-19 hospital fatalities have been among under-20s — 20 out of a total 28,888 as of July 5.
Families affected by the shielding move will be contacted directly by their children’s doctors to discuss whether they can stop shielding and what to do next.
Dr Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer for England, said these discussions would happen over the summer, with looser restrictions beginning at the end of July.
Children included on the list had been those with kidney disease, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, scoliosis, diabetes and severe asthma.
The move comes as shielding for 2.2million ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’ adults loosens today, July 6, as they are allowed to meet up with others for the first time.
Direct flights to Greece are set to resume from next week in a boost to British holidaymakers, it was also revealed today.
Leicestershire Police were forced to impose an urgent dispersal order on Market Harborough (pictured) when alcohol booze-fuelled disorder erupted on Saturday night.
Powers to send people away from the town centre were handed to police last night after ‘shameful and frightening’ scenes
Air routes from the UK to the popular holiday destination can reopen on July 15, a month after they started up for many other European countries.
But arrivals in the country may still have to take a coronavirus test and self-isolate – even though the government has waived quarantine restrictions for Greeks coming to Britain.
Greece kept the ban on direct flights from Sweden and the UK, along with other higher-infection states, when it previously loosened the rules on June 15 and July 1.
Greece has managed to contain its coronavirus outbreak to just 3,500 infections since reporting a first case in February.
In other developments, a leading expert claimed the coronavirus could have been lying dormant across the world until being ‘ignited’ by favourable environmental conditions – rather than originating in China.
Professor Tom Jefferson, of Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM), pointed to a string of recent discoveries of the infection’s presence around the world before it emerged in Wuhan in December.
Traces of Covid-19 have been found in sewage samples from Spain, Italy and Brazil which pre-date its discovery in China.
Discussing the possibility the virus didn’t originate in China, Professor Jefferson told The Daily Telegraph: ‘Strange things like this happened with Spanish Flu.
‘In 1918 around 30 per cent of the population of Western Samoa died of Spanish Flu, and they hadn’t had any communication with the outside world.’
He added: ‘The explanation for this could only be that these agents don’t come or go anywhere.
‘They are always here and something ignites them, maybe human density or environmental conditions, and this is what we should be looking for.’
It was also revealed today that a historic market town 15 miles south of Leicester was turned into a ‘war zone’ after it was invaded by hundreds of people from the locked down city desperate for a night out with friends.
Leicestershire Police were forced to impose an urgent dispersal order on Market Harborough when alcohol-fuelled disorder erupted on Saturday night.
It came as a busload of Leicester City fans who went up to Nottingham to watch the match with Crystal Palace on Saturday afternoon gave themselves away after cheering wildly as their hero Jamie Vardy scored his 100th Premier League goal. Locals raised the alarm and they fled before the police arrived, according to The Sun.
Police had already feared being overrun by out-of-town drinkers when pubs reopened on Saturday after Leicester mayor Sir Peter Soulsby claimed that Leicester pub fans in search of a pint ‘could drive to Market Harborough’.
Leicester was put into a two week city-wide lockdown last week after a flood of new coronavirus cases emerged – three times higher than the next city – meaning that as the rest of England’s pubs reopened on July 4, those in Leicester will have to wait until July 18 at the earliest.
Electricity engineer Kevin Spicknall saw the trouble unfold from a cherry picker while working on ‘Super Saturday’ and described ‘carnage’ outside three pubs in the town as hundreds converged on the town centre.
He said: ‘Throughout the afternoon everything was lovely and settled. Then, at about 6pm, the pubs started to get really busy and it was noticeable they weren’t locals And from then on it became messy. There were fights, tussles with the police.
‘One girl was beaten up by some people from Leicester. So the police decided to start clamping down and issued a dispersal order. It wasn’t extreme violence but there were angry young men acting like angry young men.’